JOHNNY’S THE MAN, with the flowing yellow tie and the timeless mustache. From the second deck of the eastbound Long Island Railroad train he regales his fellow passengers with tales of the early days of his commute in the sepia-toned waning hours of the Nixon Administration. At least until the train reaches Kings Park and he gets off this amusement park ride gone terribly wrong to head to his suburban castle. Johnny doesn’t drink but the vultures who crowd around the WC do, they nurse their Bud Lights from paper bags, as if we can’t see the shiny blue metal beneath. These three kings of commuter land have slicked back thinning hair and show purple where the cheek meets the eye. Along with their comical attempt at business attire, they display the paunch of the modern professional, a calling that requires many decades of sitting on one’s ass. “Oh, well,” they sigh. “Gotta earn a living …”

And this is what they sacrifice it for — telephone wires and half extinguished neon signs, 99 cent discount stores and greasy hamburger joints. I did that, too, I think, but I only lasted a month and a half before we rushed into Hoboken with its sometimes quick PATH connection. I’d wake up and scrape the ice from the windows of the station wagon and then I’d run out of gas on the way to Ronkonkoma station. Then I’d walk to the Hess station and buy a plastic container and fill it with Regular Unleaded and then walk all the way back to the car and fill it up with my numb fingers on the plastic and metal. The reenergized fuel tank would show a quarter of a tank and I’d think, “Ah, just enough,” that look of contentedness, just enough to get me on the next train, to buy my coffee and doughnut, to let Bebel Gilberto massage my aching soul through my headphones …

Forty-five days. That’s all it took for me to give up on that life. And yellow-tie man’s been here since The Godfather, Part II.

What the hell, right? Don’t bash on the commuter, that beleaguered martyr of wing-tipped Manhattanite dreams. You think he wants to sit on this train? No. He has to. Or at least he has convinced himself that he has to, and those around him are passionate in their agreement. Yes, we have to. And at the same time, you couldn’t do it. You couldn’t get in lock step with the rest of the human race. You thought there had to be another way. Career opportunities await in San Francisco or Juneau or Bozeman, places with a better view. “Oh, but my family …” But your family consists of Americans who left other continents to come here. They’ll just have to understand. “Oh, but my career.” Remember those vast graveyards in Queens? That’s what God thinks of your career.

Into this walks a woman with an Eastern face that reminds me of old drawings of Genghis Khan, with maroon pants and Inuit boots and a rough flannel jacket and a mariners wool hat. She stands among the living dead and speaks to someone through some device and then stands there and watches the windows, avoiding the glances of the skeleton crew on the LIRR. I glance at her too, and I see that her eyes are alert, as if she has also stepped out of an alternate reality into this soul-muddying one, and she looks back at me, trying to discern my intent, as if I was checking her out, which I am not sure if I am. All I can think, is that I am grateful that there are other living people here on this train of the dead like her. Alive on the train of the dead. In such a place, they are easy to spot. They shine like angels.

IT CAME OVER ME  a few years ago in a little dive of a record store off Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, a place so starved for space that the recorded output of Ziggy, Damian AKA Jr. Gong, Ky-Mani, Stephen, and Julian was grouped together under one sign, “Sons of Bob Marley.” And in that store I picked up my copy of Willie Colón’s album Cosa Nuestra. Carefully, cautiously. It had a menacing cover, a mercenary man with mustache and sinister trombone case standing over a body on a pier with a rock tied to its foot. Bad shit. And, let’s not forget, it was in Spanish.

I glanced over my shoulder and caught the clerk eyeing from me and set the disc down. “No, it’s not what you think. I mean, I’m not.” But I was just too curious to pass it up, and after that, things were never quite the same. My car was a roving salsa party. Ching ching ching, ching ching ching. I grasped for the wandering piano patterns, felt the bass skip about in that definitive way, so sublime you couldn’t tell if those strings were plucked or merely inferred notes, music you thought you heard but was never really there. True majesty.

There was a nurturing of the inner Latino, in those early Willie Colón days, especially, when I was in my old ‘hood on Long Island, I would roll the windows down, because I knew how much the local Anglos and wannabe Anglos detested the Latinos who were taking over their country with their swinging dance music and outdoor family parties and seven children and 42 grandchildren and 307 great grandchildren, and I wanted them to hear that trombone and Hector Lavoie’s boogaloo voice. They were like audiokinetic hand grenades — “Take that, you pretentious country club pricks, and that, and that, and that!” BAM! They went over. BANG! They went down. Dead, deceased. Slayed by the trombone of Willie Colón and his Cosa Nuestra. Or so I imagined.

But the frosting came the other night in the real San Juan, the day after “Three Kings’ Day,” when they children flitted about the Condado Beach park, trying out their new skateboards and roller skates and soccer balls, little Antonios and Andreses and Carolinas and Catalinas being chased by parents who seemed joyous and content and so far away from the petty clannish conflicts of the norte-americanos and who I only caught glancing into the absorbing soul sucking mirrors of the so-called smart phones in a few instances, because who needs a phone when you can have a park in San Juan? Palm trees, great big trunks of other kinds of trees that seemed to be one hundred percent roots, all decorated up with blue and white Christmas lights in night weather that still made you sweat at nine o’clock.  With true affection, the local mothers with their toothy white smiles fawned over my little Maria — “A Spanish name!” “One of us!” — but did I really care to remind them that it was an Italian name and even a Swedish one?

The braided child Sanjuaneros poked at her and prodded at her with curiosity — Who is this little blue-eyed Maria girl? — but they were always kind and playful and inclusive. In Maria’s little blue eyes, I saw two-year-old wonder, and the reflections of the Christmas lights and the street lamp lights, and the Three Kings’ felicitations. And when the breeze picked up and the palms rustled, I thought I could heard the distant salsa music playing down the street, even if it was that special, inferred music I was telling you about, those melodies and rhythms you can hear but that aren’t really there.

IT’S A PITY that I shaved because Williamsburg is for the unshaven. Not that I ever set out in my life to match myself up to some kind of image {Like those three fellas over there, the ones with the wire mustaches and wispy beards and Where’s Waldo? hats, standing outside that vintage clothing boutique} but I had taken to keeping it hairy when I lived in Estonia because it was cold and I had children, and I’d get about half of the fuzz off before I had to go intervene in some domestic unrest, leaving me with half a beard, so it made sense to just buzz the fuzz. Which is what I had set out to do the night before my daughter’s birthday, except I forgot the attachable comb on the groomer and took a chunk off the beard, leaving me with no choice but to …

Yet it was not enough to undo the fact that I was listening to the 13th Floor Elevators when I was 16 {Thank you very much} and the MC5 before that. You can take the facial hair off the hipster, but he will ooze and reek hipness nevertheless. “It’s so weird,” says Epp eyeing lanky thirtyish men with tormented expressions and facial hair. “All of these guys. They all look like you.” “What’s that, honey? Hey, could you move out of the way? I want to take a picture of the Konditori Swedish Espresso Bar.” “Why?” “So that I can show it to my Swedish friends.” “What Swedish friends are you talking about?” “Um, Elias.”

Epp loves Williamsburg. She cherishes it, relishes it, the same way she beholds the steam off her coffee. Oooh. Ah … I don’t think she ventured within a few blocks of the vaunted yellow Mini-Mall on Bedford Avenue. {“Three dollar books?!”} And then there were the two mandala traps — the Tibetan shops. Uh oh. She didn’t stand a chance. There was also the matter of the banana and peanut butter and brown bread sandwiches {“See, Estonian bread is becoming really popular. We should import that …”} Ah, is this our future? The Hipster Estonian Bread Merchants? {Or is that just the name of my new band?}

Ah, yes, graffiti. Ah, sigh, yes, stinked up toilets and funked up telephone booths {“And I bought some ginger elixir at the grocery — organic ginger, organic turmeric, organic this and organic that, oh, and organic carrot and organic garlic juice”}  Ah, yes! Stunning Brooklyn Fox Lingerie models in the frosted windows with the sparkling What Does The Fox Say? foxy masks. “Hmph, I wanted to go to New York City,” says the ten year old, thinking Toys ‘R’ Us amusement park or Wizards of Waverly Place. “But Brooklyn is New York City,” comes the paternal-hipster-parental reply. “It is?” “It is.” And, yes it is a gathering point mecca for poseurs. But I am a poseur {“Hey, I didn’t mean to shave, guys, it was an accident“} and I am just fine with that now.

WHERE DOES THE TIME GO? They ask. It’s an honest question, a serious one, a frequent one. “The years just blow by.” But do they? Because when I think of the day when our first daughter was born, it feels like it happened a long time ago. How many homes have we had since then? I care not to count them. The  past decade brims with times and places and things that happened then. How I cradled the newborn in my arms in that hospital corridor in snowed-in Tallinn, or how I ran back and forth over the bridge in Glasgow in the summer of ’05, with the 18-month-old barn on my shoulders, and the sun and wind in our hair. She laughed and loved it. On the Isle of Arran, Epp nursed her in the rare Scottish warmth. We fanned out across the soft green moors, following sheep, searching for standing stones. We changed her diaper in the grass with the midges buzzing about.

Two thousand and five. We lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, that summer. It was hot and crushed-like-sardines urban, the home to which we returned. The other day, I was driving past our old place, coming up over the hill, with Manhattan in the distance, I could almost see myself chasing the little one down the sidewalk on the way to the park. “Lähme kõndima!” She says. It’s an Estonian phrase that means “Let’s go for a walk.” Except on that day, when she yelled it, I wasn’t sure of what it meant. I was listening to melancholic music and began to tear up, not because I was sad, but because it seemed like that scene happened so long ago. Who knows if she remembers any of it. Now, she’s a decade old and tells me that my hat is stupid and that my jokes are bad, and that all the bands I listen to sound like The Beatles, and that I’m just annoying, period. Then she hooks her arm in mine while we are walking, as if she’s afraid to fall.

THE ADDRESS IN THE GARMIN ended with Parksville, New York. But to get from lower New York to upper New York you have to go through New Jersey. The master Garmin sent me through the Lincoln Tunnel, and New York glitz faded into Jersey ruin with each westward avenue. By the time I emerged on the other side of the Hudson, I knew well where I was — Chris Christie’s state, the tax-rich, high-income land of rotten infrastructure. Time-eaten bridges that resemble the weathered limestone of Yucatan archaeological sites, tomb-like wetlands that grow unhappily around electric towers. The sprawl arrives and gives way in pleasant waves of Lowe’s, Home Depot, Michaels, Best Buy, Target, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Michaels, Best Buy, Shoprite.

But soon you see the hills, the fuzzy gray Ramapo mountains, known for a mysterious triracial isolate — the mountain people — who are thought to descend from local Indians, free Blacks, and Dutch settlers, even Hessian mercenaries from the Revolutionary War. Now you are back in New York State, heading up into Rip Van Winkle country, sleepy hollows of mysteries. The Catskills, little settlements and towns with generic and oddball names. In Sullivan County, there is a ghost town called Neversink. It lies at the bottom of a New York City Reservoir.

Somewhere in the same county I started to encounter large billboards for breads and meats. LIEBER’S: KING OF KOSHER FOODS. MANISCHEWITZ: QUALITY SINCE 1888. Little Orthodox Jewish boys and girls with golden locks and heads covered, eyes revealing the pleasures of rye bread and pastrami. And then the shanty shops built into the hills with the yellow and black signs: WE BUY GOLD. Many miles northwest of Rockefeller Center, where the late autumn fog and moisture at last gave way to sun-kissed cliffs and a light dusting of snow, I had stumbled upon a melange of Crown Heights and Gold Rush Era California.

When I arrived at the maple candies factory, the cheerful ruddy owner asked me how my trip had been and I told him about the signs. “What?” he said, “you mean you haven’t ever heard of the Jewish Alps?” “The Jewish Alps?” I imagined men in long black coats on skis, trailed by faithful Saint Bernards, each of whom bore a barrel of rescue Manischewitz wine around its neck. “Every summer, the population of Sullivan County swells to about 150,000 from 76,000,” the jolly owner said. “They all come up from the city. There are dozens of youth camps, too. Three right down the road from here.” “And they put all those signs up so that Jewish families will be reminded to buy Kosher matzo and wine when they’re driving up?” “You betcha.”

IT DIDN’T OCCUR to me growing up that I was living through history. Only later, as I sat  in a classroom in Tartu, Estonia, listening to the professor recount the overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romanian regime to 18 and 19 year old students, did I realize that I could remember each moment of the event as it was reported, including the small details, such as the tidbit that hundreds of Romanians had volunteered to carry out the fallen leader’s execution by firing squad. It was Christmas Day, 1989. The Eighties were almost over.

But they weren’t. A few weeks later, in South Africa, a man who had been imprisoned for 28 years emerged from jail. His name was Nelson Mandela and I knew all about him from watching an HBO documentary called Mandela. It starred Danny Glover as the political prisoner.  It took me some time, upon his release, to connect the “fiction” of the 1987 film and the reality of the freed man holding the real Winnie Mandela’s hand {And there was a real Winnie Mandela? And it all really happened?} They looked less Hollywood in real life, but that was okay, because that thing called Apartheid was coming to its deserved end.

Apartheid. It was one of those words floating around when I was a kid, like Glasnost and Perestroika. Later I learned what each word meant and its etymology, but really they were words and ideas onto themselves. To me, Glasnost and Perestroika meant rock concerts in the Soviet Union. To me, Apartheid meant African kids chanting down the streets of dusty ghettos yelling slogans and carrying signs and meeting riot police. {Which looked a lot like the images broadcast from Israel in those days of the Intifada.}

So Nelson Mandela was but one icon of a decade known for big personalities and big words that were large and thick with unsaid messages. Images and words seemed more powerful then. There were fewer of them, and so they stuck with you.

There was soft poetry in that name — Mandela. It sounded like the gentle and grassy hills of the mystery continent. Even if he had backed guerrilla attacks against the South African government, no one saw him, heard of him, and thought of violence just because of who he was and how he looked and what he was called. To compare, think of Margaret Thatcher, the British iron lady, a woman whose very name brought to mind severity and harshness. Which is not to say that many Britons did not welcome it. Thatcher. It sounded like a weapon whipping through the air. It was in the ‘Th,’ the tight ‘a’,  the ‘ch.’ Its true meaning refers to someone who makes and repairs roofs, but it didn’t sound like a roof repairman to my ears. It gave you goosebumps.

Who preceded Thatcher? Wikipedia tells me it was someone named James Callaghan. Remember him? Me neither. And who came after? John Major, of course. But what else can you remember about John Major? Not much, really. No, there was a perfect constellation of personalities in Thatcher and Mandela’s era of charisma. Let’s not forget that the three most important American entertainers of the decade were Michael, Madonna, and Prince. Even older entertainers assumed single-named status. Bruce Springsteen just became “Bruce.” People would say, “I went to see Bruce.” And there was a lot of meaning in that one syllable, “Bruce.” Say “Bruce” or “Madonna” or “Mandela” or “Thatcher” to someone at that time, and a very certain mood would settle in and linger. It wasn’t like today, when a word like “Obama” can mean so many different things. One week it’s a website, the next week it’s a Kenyan uncle, the next week it’s a great speech.

Everything moves ever faster now, though. It’s blur and delirium. I find myself agitated by all the intelligence, the many images on the screens, the sounds of urgency my phone makes when a text message arrives. I crave simplicity, silence. Give me back my safe childhood of dependable names and images, of Apartheid, Glasnost, and Perestroika, of Mandela and Thatcher. Give me some sturdy rocks to latch onto while I am swept down the Information Superhighway. But Mandela’s gone now, Thatcher’s gone. It’s all been washed away.

IMAGINE YOU WERE RELATED to one of the most notorious Indian killers in American history. Now, imagine you were also related to some of those Indians. You can now begin to understand the traumatic baggage that comes with being an American.

In 1637, in the service of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Captain John Underhill led an attack, together with Mohegan Indians, on the Pequot fortified village near modern Mystic, Connecticut. They set fire to the village, killing any who attempted to flee. About 400 Pequots died in what came to be called the Mystic Massacre. But Captain Underhill’s soldier of fortune Indian killing was only just beginning. In the service of New Netherland, he slaughtered between 500 and 700 individuals thought to be of the Siwanoy and Wechquaesgeek groups of the Wappinger Confederacy. And in 1644, he cleared Fort Massapequa right here on Long Island, killing about 120 Indians. According to historical accounts, after the Natives were dead and stacked up, Underhill and his men sat down and ate their breakfast.

Underhill died in 1672. He has many thousands of descendants. One of them was Amelia Earhart. Another one of them is me. I only became aware of this connection by doing my family tree. And in doing my family tree, I became aware of another connection.

About a year ago, I went to visit my 95-year-old grandmother in the assisted living home. I asked her if we could swab her cheek. We were going to do a DNA test. “Come on, Mom, we can find out at last if you’re part Indian,” my father said to his Virginia-born and reared mother, who still speaks with a Tidewater drawl, even though she’s lived in New York for 70 years. “Well, I wouldn’t doubt that,” she said cackling. “And maybe you’re part African, too,” he added. This made her straighten up and her blue eyes widen. “Well,” she said, in her most Southern Belle kind of way, “I’d be very, very surprised.”

According to the data, Grandma has no African blood, or if she does, it is so small that it does not register a percentage point. But she does have Indian DNA — I’ve run the data through five admixture tools, and they report back results of between 1 and 2 percent. I’ve compared segments, sent it to a specialist. He pronounced the findings legit. This would mean that one of her ancestors, born in about 1750, if you do the mathematics, was a Native American.

“Which tribe?” everybody wants to know. The line of hers that is most likely Native goes back to a swampy area on the east side of the Chowan River in North Carolina. It at times was the home to at least three different displaced Native peoples — the Iroquoian Tuscarora and Meherrin, and the Algonquian-speaking Chowanoke. All of these tribes were shattered by disease and warfare, both with settlers and with each other, which made assimilation into the local European and African communities an avenue for personal survival. And one of these people, probably a woman, was my ancestor.

Before you start romanticizing a serene, peace-loving group of Pocahontases robbed of their land though, read more about the Tuscarora War, which raged from 1711 to 1715, and allowed, once the Tuscaroras were defeated, the further settlement of North Carolina. If you read the accounts, when the Tuscaroras rose up in Carolina, English settler women “were laid on their house floors and great stakes run through their bodies. Others big with child, the infants were ript out and hung upon trees.”

This is American history. It is ours and it is brutal.

Recently, my wife and I attended a film night at the library in Greenport, where we watched a documentary about Long Island’s Native Americans — with a special focus on the Shinnecock Nation. In fact, it was called Shinnecock. The filmmaker, Thomas Hoffman, mixed in some general North American Indian history, too, to put things in perspective — The Trail of Tears, The Battle of the Little Big Horn , Wounded Knee, the American Indian Movement. A strong message was that of victimization — “Look at what we have endured, what has been done to us, we have been abused for centuries, and now you tell us to get over it?!”

This message confused me though. Who was I in this struggle? Was I the offspring of the perpetrator or the victim or of both? I think a lot of Americans from time to time ask themselves that same question.